Mike Jastrzebski's Blog, page 100
January 4, 2011
Shameless Self-promotion
(January 2, 2011. Southwest Florida)
The year 2011 is upon us. Fortunately, I jump-started the New Year's resolution thing and got A Single Deadly Truth up on Amazon in the final days of 2010. But now comes another question of truth: will the book find an audience?
In the coming months, I will be trying to help this process along by promoting the book. I am determined to resist the temptation of becoming a shameless book pimp. My goal is to balance my interest in creating visibility while not going overboard (unless I'm still not selling books in which case I'll go turbo-shameless).
Book tours don't work so well with e-books, and an ad in the New York Times Book Review is beyond budget, so I'm going to focus on creative alternatives. I've spent a goodly amount of years in the cable TV business and I've been entrepreneurial, so I'm working up some innovative approaches that might generate some sales. Here are some of the items on my to-do list as I finalize my marketing plan:
1) Investigate product placement opportunities on the local government access cable channels. Municipal budgets are tight, aren't they? If I toss them a few bucks, maybe I can slide some A Single Deadly Truth coffee mugs in front of a few on-camera local officials.
2) Speaking of government access, you might see me testifying at more town meetings once my Steve Decatur t-shirts come in. Zoning board meetings, budget reviews, school committee meetings – I'm there.
3) And as far as free advertising – one winter project is converting our boat's mainsail into an enormous book promotion. I figure two hundred colored Sharpie markers should do it.
4) Along the same lines, my nephew is an Idaho-based smokejumper and he claims he can land on a twenty-foot target. If I get him out this way in the spring, I'm going to use some more Sharpie markers to make a colorful book ad on his chute. Imagine him dropping into Fenway Park on opening day. Between the stadium audience, game coverage, and nightly news I should sell at least a few books, don't you think?
5) And if we're talking water and tee-shirts, how about sponsoring a Steve Decatur wet t-shirt contest down in Florida during Spring Break? Oops, maybe I got carried away on that one.
I am sure many more neat ideas will come to mind. In any event, I will make every effort to curb my desire to hawk my book in poor taste. And if my target audience gets overwhelmed by all of this, maybe they can catch a break by taking an escapist time-out by spending some time on the waters of Buzzards Bay and Rhode Island Sound with Steve Decatur, maybe even catch him in the tale of…..
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Failure/James Jones/James Dean/High School Play/Writing/Agents
By Michael Haskins
The New Year has arrived and you've got to expect a lot blogs on New Year's Resolution as well as conversations and some people even go as far as to send letters out to friends with their resolutions. I guess if they tell everyone they're going to quit smoking, or some suck silliness, they'll have to do it or feel like a failure.
Writers, on the other hand, are not afraid of failure! Me for example, I've continued to contact agents in and around NYC with query letters for longer than I want to think about. Failing to capture an agent's imagination is a kind of failure, failure of my query, anyway, or the three chapters or the synopsis I sent; maybe the whole package. The agents never say why the story isn't for them just that it isn't. But they do wish me luck placing it somewhere else. I sometimes writer back with as much sincerity and say thank you.
It's my failure, but it is also the collective failure of all those agents too. If you've been to the MWA's Florida chapter's SleuthFest, (www.mwaflorida.org) you will hear the same story told by some of the must successful writers and the unpublished writers, it took a hundred attempts before an agent accepted me.
Every writer has a room full of rejection slips. I recall when they came in the snail mail and you literally had people like me pasting the rejection slips on a wall.
I also remember that James Jones wrote in the introduction of a collection of his short stories that every story in the book had been rejected when he first sent it out. After he became successful, he resubmitted the stories to the same magazine that had rejected it and they were all accepted.
The stories hadn't changed, he had because he was successful. So it goes, one day you can't do anything right and after one success you can't do anything wrong.
For 2011, I resolve to continue to be a pain in the ass to NY agents, until I find one smart enough to recognize my talent. I hope there's an agent out there making a New Year's Resolution to stop being a dumb ass and really read the material that comes in, he might discover a new talent! Do you think?
I also resolve not to limit myself to agents only in NYC. I will go to NJ, and Connecticut too. Somewhere within the borders of those three states there has to be one reasonable agent with the ability to recognize my genius. You'd think, right? Hope so.
I resolve to write more. I know I can't sit down and chain myself to the computer like Stephen King or Robert Crais, but I can spend a little more time writing and not plotting and thinking the story through.
My problem is that I have it all worked out in my head, and maybe in my notebook, but then my characters take over and run with it without much consideration for what I had sketched out. When I am in a reflective mood and not sure how it all happened, I sometimes think that maybe God feels that way about us – His failed experiment. Maybe?
My second book, Free Range Institution, is due out in about a month, my third book, Car Wash Blues, is floating around out there looking for that one agent with insight, and I am about 120+ pages into my fourth book, Stairway to the Bottom.
Being an Irish Catholic I've got my Jewish friends beat when it comes to guilt. I sometimes have a hard time differentiating between an Irish-Catholic mother and an American-Jewish mother when it comes to making us feel guilty.
I often feel guilty because I don't write enough. By that, I mean time wise. I sometimes feel beaten down after less than an hour and other times I can go for four or five hours. Some days I write as few as 150 words and other days more than 2,000. Some days I only self-edit, to remind me where I am at in the story and the changes that have taken place.
I resolve to rid myself of the guilt and feel as elated at 150 words in a day as I do 2,000. Now that's gonna be a tough one.
Resolutions have one thing in common and that is they are made on dreams and ordained to fail. The battle is to go as long as you can with your resolution. Six days or six months, give it your best. It's all about the battle, the game, the challenge . . .
In high school, a little red clapboarded abode in the marshes of North Quincy, Massachusetts, I joined the drama club (hey, James Dean was dead and someone had to take his place. Unfortunately it wasn't me) and I learned a great lesson. I learned I wasn't gonna be the next James Dean, but that isn't the great lesson. I realized after the play* was over, when the final curtain came down and we were at the wrap party, that the play itself wasn't important, it was all the work going into getting it done that was important and made it fun. I wasn't going to miss the play, I was going to miss all the worth that led up to the play.
My final New Year's Resolution is to look at my writing in that same light. I'm having a hell of a good time playing god in my little world and the fact that someone, somewhere is going to read about my world and possible like it is great, but the fun is in challenge of creating my world each day, being surprised by the characters and learning that sometimes it's out of my hands.
Happy New Year.
*For anyone that cares, the play was In Our Town by Thornton Wilder, and I played the newspaper boy in the opening.
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January 2, 2011
From Rags to Riches on the Kindle-I'm giving away a free Wi-Fi Kindle.
To celebrate six months of selling e-books (I've sold over 2250 copies in that time) I have decided to give away a Wi-Fi Kindle in January. This is the $139.00 Kindle and the prize will be awarded on 01/31/2011 as a $139.00 Amazon gift certificate so that if you already own a Kindle you can stock up on e-books or anything else you want to purchase. I will also give away a $10.00 gift certificate on January the 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th. The more often you enter the more chances you have to win. If you win a $10.00 certificate you will still be entered in the Kindle drawing.
There are five ways to enter-the rules are simple!
1) Share this post on facebook. (1 entry every time you share-maximum 1 share per day allowed) To do so scroll down to the end of this post and click on the share on facebook link button, then notify me that you have done so at mike@mikejastrzebski.com.
2) Purchase The Storm Killer in any format and forward me a copy of your receipt to mike@mikejastrzebski.com. See below for available formats.
3) Purchase Key Lime Blues in any format and forward me a copy of your receipt to mike@mikejastrzebski.com. See below for available formats.
4) Post a review of The Storm Killer by 01/30/2011 on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Goodreads or Smashwords and notify me that you have done so at mike@mikejastrzebski.com.
5) Post a review of Key Lime Blues by 01/30/2011 on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Goodreads or Smashwords and notify me that you have done so at mike@mikejastrzebski.com.
Here are the links to my books in the various formats.
To order for the Kindle click on these links: The Storm Killer - Key Lime Blues
Click the following link to order The Storm Killer from Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003U2TH1I.
Click the following link to order Key Lime Blues from Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003Z9JP36.
To order The Storm Killer or Key Lime Blues for the Nook click on the following link: http://tinyurl.com/26xj37a
To order The Storm Killer or Key Lime Blues for the Sony reader click on the following link: http://tinyurl.com/29vh8mm
To order at SmashWords for all readers click on the following links: The Storm Killer http://tinyurl.com/28dzhs6 Key Lime Blues http://tinyurl.com/35ap2dl
GOOD LUCK!
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December 30, 2010
My Top 20 iPad Apps of 2010
I find it very difficult to believe that I have only owned my iPad since May of last year because it has changed the way I think and how I compute so profoundly. I was going to make my top 5 list, then it grew to 10 and now it is a list of 20 apps that I feel I would not want to live without. Today, on the last day of 2010, I would like to share with you the list of apps that this sailing writer would suggest for anyone out there who just got an iPad (or perhaps an iPad Touch) from Santa.
Kindle app for iPad FREE There are so many book apps out there and I have many on my iPad as you can see from the image above, but the app I choose to read in most of the time is the Kindle app.
Zinio FREE This magazine reader allows you to still get all your favorite magazines on the iPad without having to pay for forwarding while you're cruising. There are some really good deals like 12 months of SAIL for under $10.00.
Flipboard FREE This is a design-your-own-magazine app. It is a beautiful app designed for leisure reading.
Weatherbug Elite for iPad FREE This one is free for now and I don't know how long that will last. I love the radar with the playback. It's great to set it in motion so you can figure out where the rain clouds are headed and you can go the other way.
Evernote FREE This remains my favorite note-taking app because of the excellent job it does of clipping webpages, saving photos, recording audio notes, etc. and then syncing all across all my computers and mobile devices.
Dropbox FREE Apple awarded Flipboard their app of the year award, but I'll bet more people use this every day. This app allows users to move documents among devices, computers and the cloud.
Skype FREE The new Skype 3.0 (released yesterday) allows video conferencing as well as the regular phone calls on mobile devices. The current model of iPad has no camera, however, so it can only receive video — it cannot send. I'm thinking that's a good thing!
The Guardian Eyewitness Free A new gorgeous photograph each day that reflects something that is current in the news and has a tab for hints from the photographer. It's an art app and a daily lesson in photography.
Reeder for iPad $4.99 I find this is the best RSS reader on the iPad. It's great for those days when you want to skim through lots and lots of text without being bothered by graphics.
Weather HD $.99 Not the most weather information in an app, but the prettiest weather app for the iPad. I'm a sucker for beautiful apps.
Blogshelf $4.99 I love the way this app downloads all my blogs and puts their most recent posts on a beautiful bookshelf.
Instapaper $4.99 This elegant app allows you to save the text off interesting websites so that you can read it later when you might be offline.
Things for iPad $19.99 Again, this is not the cheapest ToDo app out there, but I find it to be the best for my purposes. The interface is lovely and it syncs my desktop, laptop, iPhone and iPad. It also works with MobileMe and iCal.
Star Walk for iPad $4.99 With the 3G enabled iPad or iPhone or the 4th generation iPod Touch, you can just point your device in any direction, and the screen will display and name the constellations in that part of the sky.
NOAA Buoy and Tide Data $1.99 This one is just what it says it is, and there are times on watch when this information is invaluable.
iAWriter $4.99 One of the really frustrating things about writing on the iPad is the lousy keyboard. Why didn't Apple talk to a real writer when they designed it? The folks who designed this app got it right. If it was this easy, why hasn't Apple changed the Pages keyboard to look more like this?
1Password $14.99 Yes, this is expensive and it costs even more to have it on your desktop Mac or PC, but with all the sites that now require passwords, I have this on all my mobile devices and my laptops. It makes my life so easy — as well as more secure because I can now make different passwords and change them often. This app has one master password that I can remember. I consider it money well-spent to lower my blood pressure.
Wolframalpha $.99 Access expert knowledge wherever you are, whenever you need it. This is great for those times when you are writing a scene and you desperately need to know the name of the Prime Minister of Antigua or the chronology of the Jurassic Period.
iNavX $49.99 This is still my favorite app for navigation on the iPad. Yes, it's pricy, but this universal app works on both my iPad and iPhone and while it comes with access to download all of the US NOAA charts, it also allows me to choose from several different charts that I can buy from within the app.
AyeTides XL $9.99 There are lots of tides apps out there, but this one is my favorite and since it works well with my navigation program.
So there's my list and I would love to hear about any apps you all have discovered that I don't know about yet.
Finally, I would like to wish a very happy, prosperous, safe, prolific and peaceful New Year to all the writers and readers of our humble blog.
Fair winds!
Christine
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December 29, 2010
Resolutions
We're on our way back to Florida after 10 days in the cold tundra of Wisconsin and Minnesota. I've had plenty of time to contemplate the new year and here are five writing and five boating resolutions I've come up with.
Boating
1) We will complete as much work as possible on Rough Draft by April 1st at which time we will take off on our cruise.
2) Any projects not complete will be put on hold until we reach a suitable location where we can work on those projects while at anchor.
3) We will use the boat more often.
4) We will never again let work interfere with our sailing.
5) We will cruise until it is no longer fun or we are too old to keep going.
Writing
1) I will make my books available as paperbacks for those who still prefer paper to e-books.
2) I will continue to promote my books.
3) I will complete the rewrite of Dog River Blues.
4) I will write my next book while living at anchor on the boat.
5) I will spend less time on the internet and more time writing.
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF OUR READERS.
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Another Publishing Option
What happens when Random House or HarperCollins doesn't offer you a quarter-million dollar advance for your masterpiece?
Mike Jastrzebski has had a lot of success with self-publishing. He's put a lot of work into marketing and promoting his books. And it has paid off.
But, there is another option.
When my agent started shopping Sea Fare: A Chef's Journey Across the Ocean around a few years ago, she hit all the major publishers in New York. For a year we received polite rejections saying "not for us" and "not marketable". There were positive comments on the writing and the story, but no one knew what to do with it. Yachting is a small community that no one knew how to tap into. I was about to give up.
But, my agent branched out further and found a small publisher that was just starting up. NorLightsPress was an independent press that wanted to publish Sea Fare as their first book. I was thrilled.
We started sending e-mails back and forth and exchanging ideas. Not a day went by that I didn't have multiple e-mails from one of the editors or the publisher himself. They asked my opinion and answered my questions as they arose. I felt like I was a star with a whole team of publishing professionals behind me. I felt apart of their family. They gave Sea Fare 100% of their attention.
Now, you might say that that was easy since I was their only client at the time, but in the two years since publication of Sea Fare, NorLights has expanded. They now have 35 published books and work with dozens of authors. And not once in that time have they ignored me or shuffled my work to the bottom of the pile (like I hear authors at big publishing houses complain about).
Today, I sit poised to release my second book with NorlightsPress and have found the experience to be just as intimate and rewarding. The last week of October, I sent in SEAsoned: A Chef's Journey with Her Captain, thinking that I would have a few weeks break from writing before I heard anything back. NorLights received my manuscript on Friday. By Monday, I had my first set of revisions to approve from the copy-editor. By the end of the week we were discussing cover design. SEAsoned was receiving as much attention as Sea Fare did and it was going fast! The editor and I discussed what I liked about my first book and what we should change. When I suggested including "Chef Victoria" graphics as chapter openings they bent over backwards to accommodate the request. We sent rewrites back and forth with the speed of a cigarette race boat. Much faster and with more input from me than a big house offers their authors. I felt like I was apart of the whole process.
And not only did they focus on SEAsoned but they decided to revamp Sea Fare adding similar graphics and changing the type-set so it would match the second book. NorLights looked to the future of my brand and wanted both books to reflect where we were headed. What other publisher would go to those lengths?
SEAsoned will be released in two weeks time, faster than any publisher I've heard of, and once again I am impressed.
For anyone looking to publish in this ever-changing publishing industry, I would strongly suggest taking a look at a smaller publisher. Join a family. Be loved.
Victoria Allman, author SEAsoned: A Chef's Journey with Her Captain, has been following her stomach around the globe for twelve years as a yacht chef. She writes about her floating culinary odyssey through Europe, the Caribbean, Nepal, Vietnam, Africa and the South Pacific in her first book, Sea Fare: A Chef's Journey Across the Ocean.
You can read more of her food-driven escapades through her web-site, www.victoriaallman.com
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December 27, 2010
First Stories
by Tom Tripp
I've been amazed all along here on Write on The Water at the diverse talent of all these writers, and lately, of our guest authors as well. Since I can't ever seem to do anything without imagining the back-story of the activity – you know, when you're in a restaurant and looking around at all the people and imagining what their lives are – I wondered where they all got their start in writing. Did they start early? Were some latecomers to the party? Where did the spark come from? What was the first story they wrote?
We've talked here on WOTW about where authors get their story inspiration; how they fanned that creative spark of an idea into an ember and finally a roaring bonfire of a story. But how did they become writers in the first place? I'm hoping we can start a discussion here about first stories, artistic development and the origins of creativity. I'll start by inflicting upon you my first story.
Dorothy Gilman was a tall, prim woman, with rosy cheeks and silver granny glasses that contributed to the gentle old-maid impression she gave as the principal of my elementary school. The only thing most of us knew about the principal was that it was a bad thing to be sent to see her. So when my third-grade teacher passed out a ditto (remember those?) announcing an after-school "writing club," I was a little unsure. But Lisa Haag, the cute new girl in class that year was going, so I decided I'd go too. As I recall, we had big, sixth-grade chairs with armrest tables set up in the gym and Miss Gilman passed out writing pads and pencils and then gave us a writing prompt . Most vividly, I remember that successful completion of the task warranted a jumbo candy bar from the teacher. That was serious motivation.
While I can't recall too much about specific things that I wrote during our "writing club" sessions, I do remember feeling like I was a "Writer." That may have been somewhat premature, but the notion that I was already a writer served me well in many ways for the rest of my school days. Perhaps it was just the self-confidence that arose from believing I could do something, but I handled writing assignments and essay tests without fear and mostly successfully right through college.
Okay, so finally now, the actual first story I remember writing – "The Story of a Thanksgiving Turkey." The only record of this story is a rapidly fading "ditto" copy, but it is in my own handwriting. Apparently, I wrote it as a script for a play of some kind. As you can see in the photo above, there is a carefully written introduction of setting and characters. The main character is Tommy Turkey, who, with his brothers and sister (named after the cute girl in third grade) convinces the other turkeys at a local farm to go on diets in order to avoid becoming Thanksgiving dinners. Since most of you are unlikely to read it in its 5-page entirety, I will risk your ire and tell you that it has a happy ending that features a ham dinner (I guess I cared less about the pig's fate?).
The Story of a Thanksgiving Turkey by Tom Tripp
Do you remember your first story? The cute girl from third grade reminds me (yes, she's still my friend and she's an amazing writer and artist herself) that our "first" is sometimes what our parents decided to keep and call our first; and that we all probably created and told all kinds of stories much earlier than whatever early written attempt survives today. She can actually recite from memory a poem she wrote in that club.
Tell us your stories in the comments – happy endings are okay.
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December 26, 2010
It's official-I don't miss the seasons.
By Mike Jastrzebski
One of the things I'm often asked since we moved to Florida is, don't you miss the seasons? I can now answer unequivocally–NO!
Since we moved aboard Rough Draft we have had two rules when it came to visiting friends and relatives up north: first – we can't travel from late June until late October because of hurricane season, and second – we don't travel above the Mason-Dixon line from November through March. The exception to both of these rules has always been funerals and weddings.
Unfortunately my mother-in-law, Ila Wermuth, passed away last Sunday so we quickly packed the car and headed for Wisconsin. I want to take a moment and say that Ila was a good mother-in-law–I know this because I had one of the other kind in my first marriage. I'll miss Ila as will everyone who ever knew her.
This brings us to the snow. There's lots and lots of it. It snowed this morning when Mary and I went out for breakfast. Not a hard snow, but I didn't like driving in the stuff when we lived up here and I like it even less now.
I'll admit, It was kind of pretty looking out of the farmhouse window across the open fields–for about five minutes. Then I had to go and start the car. I'd forgotten how irritating it is to hear that rrr-rrr-rrr when the battery fights to turn over the engine.
Before we head home we're going to drive to Minnesota to visit my son, Neil, his wife Stacie, her son, David and my seven-year-old granddaughter, Cianna. I'm looking forward to seeing them all, but damn-it, there's more snow in Minnesota than Wisconsin.
There is one thing I've decided during this trip. Since we only come north for funerals and weddings, and I assume my granddaughter will get married some day, we need to have a talk. You tell me. Is seven years old too young to begin stressing the beauty of a June wedding in Minnesota?
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December 23, 2010
Self reliance
My outlook on the world of sailing was formed through years of sailing with my ex-husband, Jim, for whom self reliance was almost a religion and manuals were his religious texts. Jim did not believe in asking for help or ever, ever calling on a mechanic or electrician or plumber to work on his boat. That was my normal for 21 years. To Jim, if you were going to go out to sea on your boat, you'd better know how to fix every inch of her, and if you couldn't fix it, it had no business being aboard. That led us to sail on a 44-foot Islander across the Pacific from Hawaii to the Marquesas and New Zealand and back to California with tiller steering and a home-built wind vane, no refrigeration, no autopilot, no electronics other than a Heathkit depth sounder Jim had built, no VHF, no SSB, no electronic navigation, no Loran. We ate freeze-dried and canned food cooked on our alcohol stove, navigated by sextant, and read books by kerosene lantern. If anything ever broke, we fixed it and we never asked anyone for help. In Jim's view, asking for help or consulting an expert showed weakness. It meant you'd never survive "out there." That was just how I thought cruising was supposed to work.
Crazy as that sounds when you think about today's modern cruising yachts with big generators, water makers and complex electronics, we weren't nearly as extreme as these two Frenchmen and their crazy Atlantic crossing with no navigational instruments and no stove!
The Crazy Frenchmen's Atlantic Crossing
It has taken me a very long time to realize how much this philosophy has colored my life. When Jim and I divorced, and then he died a couple of years later, I became more and more of a loner. I was determined to handle everything on my own. And when I finally got my own boat, I felt I had to learn everything I could about my boat's systems and learn how to fix anything and everything. I was overwhelmed by how much I didn't know, and I left things undone because I didn't have time to learn how to do them. Just now, I was looking in an online thesaurus for a better word to describe this condition, and I came up with individualist, lone wolf, maverick, enfant terrible and deviant. They all have described me.
On the writing side of my life, the same rules applied. I never showed my books to my editor or agent until I had done all my own work on them to get them into the best shape I could, and I still turned them in with regret wishing I had been able to do one more read through. If I needed to create a scene, I felt I always had to ascribe to the principle of "write what you know," and research became my specialty as I read books on everything from Florida history to police procedure to methods of murder.
Slowly but surely, I am coming to realize that self reliance does not mean that one has to do everything alone, that one cannot ask for help if help is there, ready and willing. The last time I hauled my boat, I sanded and painted the whole bottom over a period of days with less than adequate tools, only to find out that the local crew would have done it for $300 labor cost. Next time I'll hire them.
Today, I was revising a fight scene in my novel — a scene that I felt was flat. It wasn't exciting enough. Now, instead of going to the library and trying to read everything I could about fighting — trying to teach myself the moves of those who train for years — I picked up the phone and called one of the many "experts" I count on for information. I called my brother, Dr. Stephen Gray, a black belt in Aikido and an expert at choreographing onstage fight scenes. After a lengthy discussion about possible moves, I returned to the computer with the fix in my head and raring to get it onto the page.
In today's world, it is impossible to be a Renaissance man and an expert at everything. The world has grown too complex. I now have a lengthy list of folks I'm happy to call and consult when I need that extra bit of veracity in any scene. I have a gun guy and a tugboat guy and an explosives guy and a long list of law enforcement friends. I also have a diesel engine guy and a refrigeration guy and a female diver friend. Any time, I call and ask for help, I'm breathing down the neck of all my boat and book mechanics because I only want to have to call them once for this particular problem. I reckon if I listen and learn, next time I'll be able to fix it myself.
Fair winds!
Christine
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We're here to fish…
Every so often, one of us will say or do something so notoriously noteworthy that our friends and family will never let us live it down. Sometimes a simple statement will live on, years, even decades later, haunting us, taking on a life of its own. My husband Frank made one of those infamous quotes, and it's gone on to embody a certain philosophy our family holds to, especially at times like these: the holidays.
It wasn't long after we'd met; it was one of those perfect summer days: the sun was warm without being hot and there wasn't a trace of humidity. The sky was a flawless, cloudless cerulean blue that went on forever. It was an ideal day to go fishing. With his kid brother along, we slid his flat-bottomed boat into the bed of the pickup, loaded up our tackle and headed up to a nearby lake. How could anything go wrong?
Well, to start with, upon arrival we discovered the battery for the trolling motor never made it from the garage to the truck. Frank had asked his brother to load it; his brother thought Frank had grabbed it. But we had oars and we had rods and tackle, so we forged ahead.
It wasn't long before it became obvious the fish weren't biting. Obvious to his brother and I, at least. But it was a beautiful day and it was peaceful just drifting in a little boat on that sparkling lake. I put my rod aside, leaned over and trailed my finger in the cool water. Frank's brother leaned back and gazed up at the sky, soaking in the sun's rays. But Frank refused to accept defeat. He continued to cast and reel with great determination. I watched, bemused. Cast, reel. Cast, reel. Cast, reel. At last he finally paused, regarding me and his brother, our rods down and towels clearly thrown in even as we enjoyed that summer afternoon and he uttered that memorable quote: "Damn it, we're here to fish, not to have fun."
No sooner than those words left his mouth, a look crossed his face as his brain processed what he'd said. I promptly burst out laughing and he shook his head in defeat. "You're never going to let me forget that, are you?" he said.
I haven't. In fact, that statement's gone on to symbolize whenever the quest for fun turns into an epic battle. When doing what you love becomes more of a chore than a pleasure, you've reached the 'here to fish' moment. We've all been there: we get so wrapped up in what we're doing that we lose sight of why we're doing it to begin with. Most anything we do for pleasure can gradually turn on us if we're not careful. Vacations fall victim to the 'here to fish' mindset; the hopes and expectations are so high, the time limited, and people make themselves crazed in an attempt to do it all. And it happens a lot this time of year, with the pressure to have a perfect holiday often overriding the point of the holiday to begin with. But whatever you're doing, be it celebrating with family and friends, or fixing a boat or writing or even fishing, always remember why. The object of the game, plain and simple, is to have fun.
Happy Holidays, and a safe and healthy New Year to all!
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